One of the missiles delivered by the Soviets to Cuba that prompted the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.

One of the first things to strike you about Stephen L. Carter's event-inspired new novel “Back Channel” (Knopf, 464 pp., $27.95) is how much you have forgotten about the Cuban missile crisis that sent fear rippling through the nation in the autumn of 1962.

It was a scary time. Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev had set up a missile site in Cuba, and Russian ships were steaming ahead with additional warheads and other weapons. President John F. Kennedy’s dilemma, after Russia made clear it was not going to remove the weapons, was whether or not to launch an attack. With both sides having nuclear capability, the stakes were devastatingly high.

As a growing number of the fearful along the eastern seaboard hoarding food and evacuating cities, Kennedy was being pressured by the joint chiefs and many of his cabinet to strike. He held back, wanting to avoid what inevitably would turn into a nuclear exchange. The whole country was glued to television news while the tense face-off between Kennedy and Khrushchev played out.

These facts make up the backdrop for Carter’s convincing work of fiction, which is to say this book is less like fiction than a clever imagining of one way events might have transpired. For in truth, we have never known precisely how the matter was settled, only that after several tense weeks the crisis was averted and the Russian missiles were removed.

This leaves Carter a large adn relatively blank canvas, and he makes excellent use of it. He imagines a so-called back channel – a means by which the two leaders could negotiate outside the official negotiations.

Was there indeed such a back channel? Probably. Was one of the key players an intellectually gifted,19-year-old, black Cornell co-ed? Not likely. But that doesn’t render Carter's account any less gripping.

The heroine, Margo Jensen, is tapped by her legendary and government-connected professor Lorenz Niemeyer for a mission: accompany Bobby Fisher to Bulgaria for his storied match to capture some Russian intelligence that is to be conveyed to him.

It would spoil the journey to tell you more. But the trip will take you into secret meetings between U.S. and Russian operatives, Oval Office discussions with the Kennedy brothers and McGeorge Bundy; arguments among key military personnel, and others whose names will ring bells.

Carter is a wonderful and imaginative writer, and this surely will wind up on most “best fiction of 2014” lists.
Retired Star-Ledger columnist and books editor Fran Wood blogs at nj.com.